Meet the young couple living in one of the most remote areas in Australia, all in the name of helping to bring our endangered animals back from the brink of extinction.
The Fort Grey homestead sits in one of the most remote corners of New South Wales.
From the air, it is a tiny speck of human habitation in a vast, open landscape of rolling red sand dunes and rocky terrain.
Red earth runs for thousands of kilometres.
From the homestead, the Strzelecki desert stretches as far as the eye can see.
They call this Corner Country, tucked up where the state's borders with South Australia and Queensland meet.
It's six hours' drive north from Broken Hill and the nearest neighbours are 30km away.
Four-year-old Isla and nine-month-old Zac might be the most remote children in New South Wales.
To see other children once a month at playgroup means a 300km round trip. An excursion to the supermarket is a 12-hour journey there and back.
It's hard to imagine a tougher, more unforgiving place to work and live, but Isla and Zac's parents have grown to love it.
Dr Rebecca West and her husband, Dr Reece Pedler, are both ecologists on an urgent mission to push back against the extinction crisis.
To set up a home here, Rebecca and Reece have had to sacrifice proximity to their families back in Adelaide and the ordinary luxury of a coffee shop or a meal out.
But for Reece, the "dead heart" of Australia is very much alive: "There is excitement. There's just so much incredible history."
Their home, Fort Grey, was the explorer Charles Sturt's exploration depot in the 1840s.
When Rebecca first came to corner country, she remembers: "The bit that interested me the most was that you couldn't see a tree on the horizon. I found that fascinating."
As an extrovert, she wondered how she would cope with the isolation.
When she first walked into the homestead, it was full of dust.
"I remember thinking, hmm, am I going to be able to live here?"
But they came for a higher purpose: To put something back that had vanished and bring the desert country back to health by reintroducing locally extinct mammals that had not been seen here for more than a century.
"There are species that have gone extinct on our watch and we need to make sure that doesn't happen again," Rebecca says.
Australia is "extinction central", zoo manager Dr Chris West says. "More mammals have died out in Australia over the last 200 years than anywhere else in the world."
For Richard Kingsford, professor of environmental science at UNSW Sydney: "Our extinction crisis is basically 30 seconds to midnight. We've lost about 100 native species and 34 mammal species."
'We'll never get the landscape back without the animals'
Fort Grey, formerly a sheep and cattle property, is now part of Sturt National Park and is the research headquarters for the Wild Deserts project lead by Professor Kingsford.
The 10-year project is a partnership between National Parks and Wildlife, Ecological Horizons and UNSW Sydney.
It has the backing of legendary conservationist and family friend Jane Goodall, who says it: "Aims to repopulate the remote and beautiful Sturt Desert with native animals that once roamed free but are now rare and endangered."
This game-changing venture, she adds, "is a ray of hope" in a race against time.
Traditional owner Leroy Johnson explains that, before European settlement, the Sturt National Park would have been "exploding with life".
"My people would have been burning off some country, the hills would have been lush with vegetation and we would have had all types of animals," he tells Australian Story.
The Malyangapa and Wongkumara were just two local tribes who lived sustainably off the land.
Overgrazing by early settlers moving into the area with sheep and cattle caused the land to decline and was catastrophic for the native animals. Settlers introduced rabbits that decimated everything in their path and predators such as cats and foxes wiped out the smaller mammals.
"Cats and foxes eat things that are bite-size," Professor Kingsford explains, "and so many of our middle-sized marsupials were really lunch, breakfast [and] dinner for these animals.
"We need these native animals back because they dig huge burrows for their food, so they're turning over all of that soil, restoring the desert.
"We'll never really get this landscape to function the way it's meant to be until we get these animals back."
Childhood of elephants, giraffes and snakes
Animals were always a big part of Rebecca West's childhood in the UK.
When she was 12, her father took on the job as director of Chester Zoo, near Liverpool. Chris West would bring his five children to work some days.
"They helped wash the elephants. They cleaned out giraffes. They saw animals being born. They fed the snakes," he recalls.
"Becky was in an attic bedroom and that became full of giant moths, scorpions, millipedes. And the crowning glory for her was a leaf-cutter ant colony."
Her childhood experiences made her want to work with animals and she completed a zoology degree in the UK.
The rest of her family moved to Australia for Chris to take on the chief executive role of the Adelaide Zoo.
On a visit out to see her parents, Rebecca was offered a PhD studying the reintroduction of rock wallabies into the fenced reserves of the APY lands below Alice Springs.
"I swapped green, grey and rainy England for red dust, dry, outback Australia. I felt like I was at home, even though I was very far from home," Rebecca says.
Reece Pedler grew up on his family's farm in the mid-north of South Australia and was also introduced to the ways of animals by his parents.
Both were strongly involved in conservation: His dad, Lynn Pedler, is one of the country's top ornithologists and his mother, Janet, has devoted her life to conservation and land management.
"My sister and I used to spend a lot of time out in the bush on scientific surveys with my parents."
When he graduated from university, he took a job in the South Australian outback at Roxby Downs on various ecology projects, where he became fascinated with waterbirds.
Reece did his PhD on banded stilts, tracking them across the inland salt lakes that form after rainfall.
Rebecca and Reece first met at a mammal society conference in 2012.
When she arrived to take a job at Roxby Downs in 2014, he offered her a spare room in his house while she looked for a place to live.
"I moved in," Rebecca recalls, "and then a month later, I just moved rooms and we never moved out."
They married in 2017. "She had fallen in love, not just with an Australian, but with the landscape, the nature, that spirit of the country and its ancient echoes," her dad says.
A dry, dusty few years in crippling drought
The couple heard the Wild Deserts project was on the cards and decided to sell themselves as a double act, Reece the project coordinator and Rebecca the project's ecologist.
They signed on in 2016, said goodbye to their families and moved to Fort Grey a year later.
The first part of the project involved building two huge 20-square-kilometre paddocks they call "exclosures" — special 2-metre-high fences with a floppy wire overhang to stop feral cats and foxes from climbing in.
Reece and his sheepdog, Peg, also tracked and removed every rabbit. That completed, they were "ready and raring" to reintroduce seven species of native mammals into the exclosures.
But, as Rebecca would discover, "the outback has a harsh side and a beautiful side".
The drought that descended towards the end of 2017 meant there was nothing for the animals to eat. It would become one of the worst droughts in Australia's history and make the couple wonder if they could keep going.
They couldn't bring the animals into a dust bowl where there was no food or water for them. The existing animals were dying.
Over the next three years, Rebecca says, "It just got progressively drier and drier until it looked like we were almost living on Mars".
"Watching everything just slowly die around you — the birds in the garden, the kangaroos, it got pretty hard for a while," she recalls.
In addition to a phone line and satellite internet that frequently drops out, temperatures in summer can sit at 45 degrees Celsius, making it impossible to work outside beyond the early morning.
When things break, there is not much chance of getting an electrician or a plumber out there. The couple were always using YouTube and working things out on their own.
Four months after moving to "the middle of nowhere", Rebecca became pregnant.
"As a first-time pregnancy, there was quite a bit of concern about where we were and what might happen if something went wrong," she recalls.
Ultrasounds were a 900km round trip to Broken Hill. "Bec was quite nervous at times about some things," Reece says. "And I was trying to reassure her when I wasn't really very sure myself."
She had her first contractions during a rabbit eradication.
"I thought I was going to have this baby in the middle of a sand dune."
When they brought newborn Isla home, there was a heatwave, with weeks of temperatures in the 40s. They were struggling.
The drought stretched on through 2018 and 2019. Dust storms made it impossible to get things done.
"You have to retreat back to the house and watch everything just being obliterated," Reece remembers.
If it had gone on much longer, they might have had to abandon the project.
Reece recalls the tap water was so hot, "we'd run the bath in the morning and leave it to sit for 8 or 9 hours so that the little temperature sensor that we put in there said it was cool enough for the baby to be in".
"We felt sort of trapped here," he says.
Rebecca was overwhelmed: "Oh my goodness, 'What are we doing with such a small child in such a remote place?'
"It really exacerbated that feeling of being remote and isolated and only having each other. I really wished my mum was closer."
But then came some relief. The drought finally broke in March 2020 with drenching rains.
They ran outside and jumped in the puddles.
Isla was two years old and it was the first time she had ever seen rain.
"She started crying because it was a big thunderstorm and there was heavy rain. I think it was a bit too much for her," Rebecca remembers.
The desert was transformed.
"You just get everything breeding, everything flowering, the smell of the plants flowering and the noise of the birds can be deafening," says Associate Professor Katherine Moseby, an ecologist and UNSW research scientist working on the project.
Professor Kingsford agrees: "The place is just bursting, everything is going off. The birds come from everywhere, the budgies sort of descend, clouds of them. And reptiles and small mammals just start taking off in these huge numbers."
Setting their 'babies' free into the desert
Now that food could grow, the time had finally come to restore the native animals to the desert. The first 10 bilbies arrived in their own charter flight from Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo.
Attaching transmitters to the animals so they could track them later, Rebecca felt like a worried mother.
"Had we set up everything ready for them? Were they going to survive? I had a sort of stress and nervous tummy."
National Parks manager and traditional owner Leroy Johnson did a smoking ceremony.
He was shaking with emotion when he released the first bilby.
"It was very magical," he says, "took my breath away and, for me, [it] means the land is healing itself."
For Rebecca and Reece, releasing the animals was a peak in their careers and time for a high five. This moment had seemed so far away for so long.
The first three of seven animals have now been released: the greater bilby, the crest-tailed mulgaras and the Shark Bay bandicoots.
All the animals were chosen, Rebecca says, not just because they were locally extinct, but also because they have really important roles to play in the desert ecosystem.
"We actually call them ecosystem engineers," she explains. "The bilbies and bandicoots dig and turn over the soil, creating burrows where rain can infiltrate and seeds can find a safe germinating spot."
There are now small mammal tracks in the sand dunes that might not have been seen for 150 years.
All the animals are healthy and putting on weight. The females have babies in their pouches.
"Suddenly we had the next generation of bilbies and the first wild desert bilbies, which was unimaginably exciting," says Tom Hunt, a field ecologist on the project.
After releasing the first ones, Leroy likes to think of them as his grandchildren.
Rebecca and Reece have also had a second baby of their own. Both Isla, and now baby Zac, accompany their parents on fieldwork.
"The program is working. The population is growing. The project so far in the first five years has been an enormous success," Rebecca says.
Saving native animals beyond the fences
But the reality is, the Wild Deserts team can't fence off the whole of Australia.
"Trying to get animals beyond fences is really like the holy grail of threatened species conservation in Australia," ecologist Professor Moseby says.
To this end, they have created The Wild Training Zone, a 100-square-kilometre area where they are training the animals to live alongside low densities of cats and foxes.
It's hoped the native species can be "trained up" to be wary of the predators and develop strategies to protect themselves.
"We need to equip them with the skills to live with cats and foxes in the landscape. Hopefully, we can find ways to get our animals beyond the fences and back across the whole Strzelecki Desert and beyond."
Rebecca often feels "mother guilt" about raising Isla and Zac in such a remote place.
"But then I think, 'Wow, what a childhood'. They are one of the few children [who] would know what a lot of these Australian native species are that are really important to our biodiversity."
Through all the adversity and the hardship of running a huge project, Rebecca says she and Reece have grown together and as parents.
"I reckon that both of us would be able to run something like the Olympics Opening Ceremony or run an airport," Rebecca laughs.
"But when conflict arises, you can't just go and have a wine with your girlfriends and unload.
"It builds and strengthens a relationship because you can't have those moments where you walk away and come back a bit later. You have actually got to face it and deal with it."
"When you sit in the Wild Deserts paddock late at night and you let a bandicoot out of a bag, you think, 'I've put something back that wasn't here. This species is now going to be surviving in this area because that's what we've done as a team and as a project'."
The team have four more species to introduce: the golden bandicoot, the stick-nest rat, burrowing bettongs and a formidable carnivore, the western quoll. They hope to have them all populating the desert by 2026.
As a custodian of the land, Leroy Johnson is overjoyed that the species that once thrived here are now back.
"It is very important that our land is healthy," he says.
"We're just custodians of the land and what's on the land. We won't be here for long. So it's important we leave them for our next generation."
Watch Australian Story's 'Into the Wild' on iview and Youtube.
Credits
Producer: Vanessa Gorman
Feature writer: Susan Chenery
Digital producer: Megan Mackander
Editor: Matt Henry
Photos: Tom Hunt, Vanessa Gorman, Oli Aylen
Video: UNSW Sydney, Australian Story: Quentin Davis, supplied: Reece Pedler and Rebecca West
